1. The Exception #3
Years later, Charlie would tell Katie that, on this night, she had done exactly what she needed, despite not listening.
In the moment, though, Charlie didn't say anything.
She looked over at her sister, perfectly content to refuse to listen to Charlie, instead making Charlie feel she wasn't alone, even in dealing with her nightmares.
So Charlie held her sister close, and breathed when Katie breathed.
And within minutes, both of them were fast asleep.
That was something you learned fast about the Wickett house: nobody mentioned things.
Charlie had the system figured out by the time she was nine.
If you didn't name it, it didn't exist. If it didn't exist, it couldn't be fixed.
Which was, as far as Charlie was concerned, the worst possible use of a perfectly good family.
Not the nightmares. Not the drill. Not the toast. Not that Ed's daughter could hear a dying engine from a driveway and fix it before lunch.
Nobody mentioned the things that mattered, because mentioning them would mean admitting they existed.
And in Diane Wickett's house, anything that didn't fit the picture simply didn't exist. The living room was spotless.
The daughters were presentable. The marriage was fine.
Everything fit. It had always fit, and it would always fit, because Diane had built her entire life on that picture.
She was not about to let her eleven-year-old daughter's midnight adventures with a drill call the whole thing into question.
Ed was never around enough to get to know his daughters.
He left for the plant before the girls woke up and came home late after dinner most nights.
On the weekends he wasn't working, he was on the golf course with the other men from management.
When he wasn't on the golf course, he was at some conference, or at the country club, schmoozing with whoever might be useful next.
If you asked Ed Wickett why he worked the hours he did, he would give you the answer that both his daughters could recite from memory, because they'd heard it at every missed school play, every absent music recital, every holiday where Ed arrived very late.
"Repeat after me," Ed would instruct. "Dad is one of the main reasons the plant earns money. And if the plant earns money—"
"—we get food on the table, a roof over our heads, and clothes on our backs," Diane, Charlie, and Katie would recite back to Ed.
If Ed was in pep talk mode, he'd be insufferable, sometimes keeping his family tied to the couch while he talked about all the good he did for the family by working long hours.
Sometimes in those moments, Katie would mouth along with the mantra out of sight of their parents, and Charlie would bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.
Diane was a different kind of absent. She was home every day, but the warmth was a performance for an audience that never arrived.
She organized bake sales for the church with items she'd had catered and told nobody.
She chaired fundraisers and dropped names the way other people dropped loose change.
She loved her daughters the way she loved the living room, best when they were presentable and didn't ask questions.
There was an afternoon when Charlie was twelve.
It was Open House night at the middle school, and Diane had brought Charlie along early to help set up the folding chairs in the gymnasium.
A woman from the PTA came over, someone Diane wanted to impress.
Diane pulled Charlie away from the chairs, put her hand on her shoulder, and waited for the woman to walk over.
"Diane," the woman said, a slight nasal sound to her speech. "It's so good to see you. Thank you so much for your help today with the set-up. We couldn't do it without you." Diane beamed. Then the woman looked over at Charlie. "And who is this fine young lady?"
"This is my daughter, Charlotte. She's going to be in the honors program next year."
"Oh, how wonderful!" the woman said.
Diane turned to look at Charlie. "Charlotte, this is Mrs. Travers. She's the director of the PTA."
"It's very nice to meet you, Charlotte," Mrs. Travers began, holding out her hand in Charlie's direction. Diane bumped Charlie lightly with her hip, causing Charlie to stick her hand out and shake the woman's hand. It was cold and clammy, and the woman had a weak grip.
"It's nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Travers."
Charlie stood there with her mother's hand on her shoulder, her name wrong in her mother's mouth.
She didn't correct it. She never corrected her mother for using her full name.
It was a fruitless endeavor every time. Instead, Charlie just continued setting up the folding chairs once Diane had let her go and returned to her conversation with Mrs. Travers.
She carried the punch bowl to the food table, ensured the napkins were restocked throughout the event, and smiled every time Diane looked over to make sure Charlie was smiling.
On the drive home, Charlie stared out the window, and neither she nor her mother said a word to each other.
Charlie's parents weren’t cruel people. Charlie had given this a lot of thought and kept arriving at the same diagnosis: cruelty would have been easier.
Cruelty had edges you could grab. Her parents were something worse than cruel.
They were distant. And distance, Charlie had learned, had a way of making a house feel like a place you stayed rather than a place you belonged.
Charlie had a word for the feeling the house gave her, though she wouldn't learn it until high school.
Suffocating.
What she did know was that the garage had air, and the house didn't. She knew that the machines and Katie in the garage were better company than the silence between her parents. She knew this because the machines would tell you what was wrong with them if you listened.
Some nights the house was worse than others.
There were times Charlie would lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, and her room would do this thing it sometimes did where the walls would edge inward, the air press down on her chest, and the quiet would become deafening.
She'd try to count backward from a hundred, she'd try breathing the way the gym teacher had taught her and her class to.
She'd flip her pillow and flip it again, changing positions in bed as much as she could try.
But the feeling wouldn't go away.
Eventually, she'd give up and swing her legs out of bed. She'd pull on Ed's old Carhartt jacket over her pajamas, pad down the hall quietly, slip her feet into her boots by the kitchen door, and sneak into the garage.
Without her parents knowing, Charlie had set it up for nights like this. She'd left a work light clamped to the shelf above the bench. She'd placed a wool blanket folded on the shelf by the step near the door, because sometimes Katie would come out here too, and Katie always forgot her slippers.
The old radio would sit on the windowsill, and when Charlie came out here, she'd turn it on, tune it to the rock station out of Indianapolis, soft enough that no one in the house was disturbed, and breathe.
Sometimes a song would come on and the knot in her chest would loosen without her permission. The music didn't fix anything. But it mattered enough that she could sit down, pick up a tool, and start working. That was everything.
The garage always had air. The machines always waited patiently. And the walls, out here, stayed where they were.